Bruce A. Dobish was inside the World Trade Center in 1993 when the bomb detonated in the garage below. Eight years later, he stood directly across the street when the first plane struck. He ran, nearly got trampled, and made it home. That episode appears in Chapter 14 of his new memoir, It Could Happen to You. The book's title, Dobish says, is not a warning but an invitation: "The title says it all. It could happen to you. It happened to me."
The significance of this announcement lies in how the book was written and what it represents. Dobish did not compose at a desk. Recovering from a fractured hip in a rehabilitation facility, immobilized with a phone as his only tool, he dictated roughly 7,000 lines between physical therapy sessions and hospital meals. "I've always wanted to write a book, and I was sick in the hospital, rehabbing," he said. "I figured it was a good time to start. All I had was my phone." What began as a way to pass the hours became a full-length memoir, and the recovery itself became one of its final chapters. The method matters because it shows that a life story can be captured even when the body is temporarily out of service—a point that will resonate with anyone facing a long rehabilitation.
The narrative moves through six decades of American life with a tone that shifts from funny to dangerous. Readers meet a kid who struggled to read but tested into a gifted program, a teenager who worked at the New York Daily News before he was legally old enough, and a college student who ran a parking-pass scheme. There is the entrepreneur who built a phone distribution operation with thousands of agents, then watched other ventures collapse. Three marriages. Poker tables and Grateful Dead shows. A sister he did not know existed until a DNA test found her. A fall on a cruise-ship gangway that nearly ended everything. And a New Yorker who kept standing next to history: the 1993 bombing, September 11, the 2003 blackout that dropped the Northeast into darkness.
A darker current runs underneath. Dobish grew up and did business around people whose choices took them somewhere he never went. Two men he counted as friends were convicted of murder. Both died in prison. "I've been through a lot," he said. "I think it's real life. People will relate to that." That unpolished honesty gives the memoir its weight.
The book is aimed at readers who prefer true stories over invented ones—fans of blue-collar New York memoir, survivors' accounts of 9/11, and the kind of book a reader finishes and immediately hands to someone else with the words you have to read this. It will resonate particularly with baby boomers who lived the same decades from a different seat, with New Yorkers past and present, and with anyone in the middle of a hard recovery who needs proof that a life is not over just because the body is temporarily out of service. In a publishing landscape crowded with celebrity tell-alls, Dobish's story stands out for its raw, dictated authenticity—a reminder that ordinary lives often contain extraordinary turns, and that it can happen to anyone.
